by James Purdy
JAMES PURDY
EUSTACE CHISHOLM
AND THE WORKS
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
for
PETER L. REDMOND and EDWARD ALBEE
CONTENTS
foreword
I
the sun at noon
II
in distortion-free mirrors
III
under earth’s deepest stream
epilogue
FOREWORD
(This was originally given as a speech on November 8, 2005, when Jonathan Franzen chose Eustace Chisholm and the Works on behalf of the Mercantile Library [aka the Center for Fiction] for the Clifton Fadiman Award for Excellence in Fiction, given annually to an American novel deemed most worthy of rediscovery. It was later published as an essay entitled “Love Letters” in Franzen’s collection Farther Away: Essays, in 2013 by Picador.)
I don’t know if anyone here remembers last year’s college football game between Stanford and the University of California. But just to remind you: Stanford had a much smaller and weaker team with like a 2–7 record, but the first half of the game it looked as if Stanford might actually beat Cal, because its defense was so pumped up that its players had entirely lost their fear of injury. There were young men running at absolutely full speed, as hard as they could, with their arms open wide, and flinging themselves against stronger young men who were running just as hard in the opposite direction. There were these spectacular, gruesome collisions—it was like seeing people run full tilt into telephone poles—and sickening numbers of Stanford players were getting seriously hurt and carted off the field, and still they just kept flinging themselves at Cal. The experience of watching their doomed effort, these repeated joyous, self-destroying collisions of young people who desperately wanted something, all of this chaos in the context of a larger suspenseful, formally gorgeous game whose outcome was nonetheless pretty well foreordained: I haven’t been able to find a better analogue for the experience of reading Eustace Chisholm and the Works.
Mr. Purdy’s novel is so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little bit posturing, or dishonest, or self-admiring, in comparison. Certainly, for example, The Catcher in the Rye, which Mr. Purdy once described as “one of the worst books ever written,” will betray its sentimentality and rhetorical manipulations as it never has before. Richard Yates, whose ferocity sometimes approaches Mr. Purdy’s, might do a little better, but you’d have to wipe away every vestige of Yates’s self-pity and replace it with headlong love; you’d have to ramp Yates’s depression up into a fatalism of such bleakness that it becomes ecstatic. Even Saul Bellow, whose love of language and love of the world can be so infectious, is likely to seem wordy and academic and show-offy if you read him directly after Eustace Chisholm. One of the darker chapters in Augie March ends with Augie’s accompanying his friend Mimi to the office of a South Side abortionist. While Bellow draws a curtain over what happens inside this doctor’s office, Mr. Purdy in Eustace Chisholm delivers—famously, unforgettably—on the horror. (It is an unbelievable scene.) The extreme margins of the stable, familiar world of Saul Bellow (and of most novelists, including me) are at the extreme normal end of Mr. Purdy’s world. He takes up where the rest of us leave off. He follows his queer boys and struggling artists and dissolute millionaires to places like
[t]his out-of-the-way ice-cream parlor near the state line, a favorite stop for truck drivers hauling smuggled merchandise, ladies committing adultery with local building and loan directors, where a preacher was shot to death by a widow who was losing his love, where the local fairies used to come late afternoons . . .
and he instills these locales with a weird kind of Gemütlichkeit. You miss having been there yourself the way you miss having ridden on a sleigh with Natasha Rostov. Near the end of Eustace Chisholm, two characters walk out onto the rocks piled up alongside Lake Michigan:
They sat down there, remembering how less desperate and much happier, after all, they had used to feel when they sat here the year before, and yet how desperate they had been then too. A few gulls hovered near some refuse floating on the oil-stained water.
What constitutes in extremis for most of us is the daily bread of Mr. Purdy’s world. He lets you try on desperation, and you find that it fits you better than you expected. His most bizarre freaks don’t feel freakish. They feel, peculiarly, like me. I read about the humiliation and incest and self-loathing and self-destruction in Eustace Chisholm with the same lively, sympathetic, and morally clear-eyed interest with which I follow the broken engagements and bruised feelings in Jane Austen. You can be sure, when you begin a Purdy novel, that all will most certainly not end well, and it’s his great gift to narrate the inexorable progress toward disaster in such a way that it’s as satisfying and somehow life-affirming as progress toward a happy ending. And when Purdy finally does, as in the last three pages of Eustace Chisholm, toss you a tiny scrap of ordinary hope and happiness, you may very well begin to weep, as I did on both my first and second readings, out of sheer gratitude. It’s as if the book is set up, almost in spite of itself, to make you feel what a miracle it is that love is ever requited, that two compatible people ever find their way to each other. You’ve so reconciled yourself to the disaster, you’ve been so thoroughly sold on his fatalistic vision, that a moment of ordinary peace and kindness feels like an act of divine grace.
Mr. Purdy shouldn’t be confused with his late contemporary, William Burroughs, or with Burroughs’s many transgressive successors. Transgressive literature is always, secretly or not so secretly, addressing itself to the bourgeois world that it depends on. As a reader of transgressive fiction, you have two choices: either you can be shocked, or you can shock other people with your failure to be shocked. Although Mr. Purdy, in his public utterances, is implacably hostile to American society, in his fiction he directs his attention inward. There isn’t one sentence in Eustace Chisholm that could care less about whether some reader is shocked by it. The book’s eponymous non-hero—a cruel, arrogant, freeloading, bisexual poet who is writing an epic poem of modern America with a charcoal pencil on sheets of old newspapers—is an obsessive reader of the letters and diaries of other people:
Unlike small towns, cities contain transient persons . . . who carry their letters about with them carelessly, either losing them or throwing them away. Most passers-by would not bother to stoop down and pick up such a letter because they would assume there would be nothing in the contents to interest or detain them. This was not true of Eustace. He pored over found letters whose messages were not meant for him. To him they were like treasures that spoke fully. Paradise to Eustace might have been reading the love-letters of every writer, no matter how inconsequential or even illiterate, who had written a real one. What made the pursuit exciting was to come on that rare thing: the authentic, naked, unconcealed voice of love.
Chisholm eventually becomes so addicted to other people’s real-life stories that he abandons his own work and devotes his attention entirely to the book’s central love: a crazy, unconsummated relationship between a young former coal miner, Daniel Haws, and a beautiful blond country boy named Amos Ratliffe. Purdy is a vastly bigger and tougher and more protean figure than his creation Chisholm—he is the author of 46 books of fiction, poetry, and drama—but, as an author, he is palpably driven by the same kind of helpless fascination and identification with human suffering. However high Mr. Purdy’s authorial opinion of himself may be, however much of a son of a bitch he may appear in his public pronouncements, when he sits down to tell a story he somehow checks all of that
ego at the door and becomes entirely absorbed in his characters. He has been and continues to be one of the most undervalued and under-read writers in America. Among his many excellent works, Eustace Chisholm is the fullest bodied, the best-written, the most tautly narrated, and the most beautifully constructed. There are very few better postwar American novels, and I don’t know of any other novel of similar quality that is less like anybody else’s work, more uniquely and defiantly itself. I love this book, and it’s a great honor to be able to select it for the Fadiman award.
—Jonathan Franzen
I
the sun at noon
1
Eustace Chisholm’s street, with the Home for the Incurables to the south and the streetcar line to the west, extended east up to blue immense choppy Lake Michigan. South of its terminus the great gray museum took up acres and acres with its caryatids, and further south rose the steel mills of Gary and South Chicago with their perpetual vomit of fire. Further down his street in a westerly direction, before Washington Park slipped into the colored ghetto, there was a rose garden in which the German poet, Lessing, sat among the blooms.
Here amid the industrial whirlwind of America’s economic burnout, the unemployed, in nondescript small separate armies, with a generous sprinkling of white youths from small towns and farms and up-from-the-South Negroes, stood in line to go on relief.
Eustace Chisholm had been caught up in two tragedies, the national one of his country’s economic collapse, and his failed attempt to combine marriage with the calling of narrative poet. He wondered whether it was because of his inability to produce a book or merely the general tenor of the times that his wife, Carla, who had supported him hand and mouth for two years, ran out on him with a baker’s apprentice some six months before this story begins.
Eustace answered for his failure as a writer on the grounds that he was too far distant from the great monopoly city of New York, claiming that no Chicago writer could become famous until he had departed the gem of prairies. Yet he dared not ever run the risk of abandoning his coign of vantage on Fifty-fifth Street, with the concomitant danger of losing his native accent and vision, so Eustace stayed in Chicago, where he was known by intimates and strangers as Ace. The original name, like a scar, he reopened each morning while shaving. “I am Eustace,” he would mumble into the mirror.
On the day this story begins Ace had been to the Catholic Salvage to see about getting an extra mattress, for Carla had taken the only good one when she had run off. Coming home empty-handed several hours later—the Salvage had only worm-eaten chairs and commodes—he stood a long time at his kitchen window, fingering his shaving cuts, dipping snuff (a habit he had acquired from his young friend, Amos Ratcliffe), and watching some Negroes five floors below delivering kosher meat to a delicatessen. Having come from a small town in northern Michigan some five years before, Ace had still not got used to the sounds of Yiddish in the throats of thrifty merchants, or accustomed to brushing against strange disoriented Negroes, Poles and unidentifiable vagrants in the streets.
Ace was twenty-nine, but he appeared—friends and enemies alike admitted—about ten years younger. Standing at the window, he considered how everybody was going to waste, especially himself. Take his “calling,” for example. The only person who was at all impressed by his long narrative poem, written in charcoal stick on old pages of the Chicago Tribune, was Clayton Harms, the electric-sign salesman. Clayton, struck by the poet’s vague affability and his having a spare bedroom, and suffering seriously from the big-city affliction of unreality and lonesomeness, had moved in on Eustace with his one grip and several cartons of electric signs. His means of livelihood interested and amused Eustace, since Clayton rented his signs to a largely Negro clientele.
Clayton was out late on a service call and in the deepening twilight Ace now sat all alone, writing as usual on his long poem about “original stock” in America. He had turned on all the lights in his apartment overlooking the street and its alley crammed with refuse. He kept all the lights lit despite the expense, as if he wanted to welcome any wanderer who might hit Chicago and give him inspiration, except that these days he knew the lights were really being lit for Amos Ratcliffe. Amos, as Eustace often repeated, clucking his tongue, was in “bad trouble.”
In the street below, Amos, a boy of seventeen with a shock of curly light hair, was looking up at the fifth-floor apartment and calling Eustace by name without response. He was about to go into the building and ring the bell when he saw the hulking figure of Daniel Haws approaching the alley.
“Heard you shouting out Eustace’s name,” Haws said, speaking as if in a kind of grim envy of the boy he addressed. “What are you trying to do, get picked up by the law? What are you calling him for, when you got a place to sleep? Come on home.” Daniel Haws, the boy’s landlord, was not more than twenty-five himself. Without waiting to see if his tenant followed, Haws strode back to Fifty-fifth Street, only to run into a young woman with straw-colored hair whom he almost knocked down. He saw her disappear into the front entrance of Eustace’s building.
Eustace, finally aroused by the sound of voices below, pulled up his window and looked down into the alley at the retreating figures of Amos and Daniel. He called out the former’s name, but when Amos did not stop he nodded gloomily and mumbled aloud, “That’s right, Amos, go home to your landlord. I got my hands full enough as it is. Besides, you’ll be back.”
At that moment who should open the door without so much as a knock, but his former wife Carla. Pretending not to notice her, Eustace stared in the direction of Amos and Daniel and said aloud: “There go hell and destruction, or my name’s not Ace Chisholm.”
“How about a cup of something hot?” Carla addressed her remarks to Ace in the manner of someone already at home who extends a thoughtful invitation to a visitor. She rubbed her hands against the cold November night. As she took off her hat, the same old felt she had worn when she went away, she exhibited a pile of straw-colored hair under which a pale peaches-and-cream complexion was fading before the double onslaught of fatigue and mental confusion.
Carla chose the mahogany piano stool, a recent acquisition from the Salvage, and sat down like a pupil waiting for her corrected exam. Eustace looked at her cautiously and obliquely from above his long charcoal pencil. His pallor came and went under his tanned face, and his face and neck flushed angrily a brick red.
“There used to be two and only two things a newspaper was good for—garbage and cat shit—but times have got so bad for writers that I can’t even afford yellow scratch-paper. Now I have to use the Tribune to write my poems on in charcoal.”
“Ace, I’m dying for a good cup of cocoa!”
Her energy made him look her in the eye. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be satisfied with some black chicory, princess,” he snapped. “We don’t serve milk, let alone cocoa, in this house to transients.”
She seemed to nod at the word we as if to show him she knew he was no longer alone. “May I make us both a cup then of black chicory, Ace?” she inquired.
He nodded ferociously.
She stood up, waited a moment, then began advancing toward him, but he threw his charcoal pencil in her direction, and she stopped.
“But Ace, it took so much brass to come in this door! I am back.” She held out her arms in an old-fashioned gesture he had seen before only in a junior high school play. He had laughed then and he laughed now.
Beginning to cry, Carla exited in the direction of the kitchen and soon he could hear her cleaning up the dirty dishes he and Clayton had left from breakfast.
“Well, the old thing’s back. She’s back!” Ace stooped to pick up his stick of charcoal. When he sat down again his gray cat jumped into his lap, and he stroked her absent-mindedly, mumbling, “She’s back, Scintilla, when she’s no longer needed.” But his voice lacked conviction.
“Who’s been living here with you, I wonder?” Carla spoke somewhat confidently, even boldly for a runaway, as she reente
red the room with two cups of black chicory as per instructions.
“Who can it be? Not you!” he paraphrased the words of a popular song, humming and gazing moonily at Scintilla. Then looking in the direction of his former wife, he said loudly: “Some fellow who sells signs lives here, for your information.”
“I see,” Carla nodded, matter-of-fact, objective from the mahogany stool, but her face, which looked as if it had been slapped, betrayed her hurt and concern.
“But there won’t be any question-and-answer period, fine-feathers,” he warned her, lash in his voice. “Remember I never answered questions in the past when you were legal here, so don’t expect anything generous in the way of info now you’re camping on the doorstep unasked and unwanted.”
He rustled loose sheets of the Chicago Tribune, covered with revisions of his poem, and complained between his teeth about his lot compared with that of the old monomaniac who published this newspaper.
“I’m glad to be back, Ace,” Carla told him, trying to keep back tears. “Even if it’s only your doorstep I’m allowed on.”
“Can you get your job back, d’ you suppose?” he talked as if to himself, correcting a word here and there scribbled over the newsprint.
“Yes, I can get a job!” She nodded energetically, under his quizzical stare.
“You’ll be needed here to pay the bills, believe you me, Carla, old girl. Shut off the gas a week ago on us. Got it back on now, of course, or we wouldn’t be drinking this cup of black, would we? You look bad, Carla, by the way.” He studied her coolly. “But except for your hair, you haven’t been really pretty for quite some time, have you? You’re peeling at the corners, if you ask me. But as I said a while back, we can use another breadwinner around the house. Of course Clayton must have his say about it.”